Dual booting - every time an adventure...

[beanzontoast]

Today, having installed a new 500gb SATA hard drive as a second SATA drive in my Xp machine, I installed a derivative of Kubuntu onto the new drive in a dual-boot arrangement. Except afterwards, the computer wouldn't boot at all. No matter what boot order I set up in the bios, no matter which was set to have priority, after a bit of bios text on screen during each boot, nothing - just a blank screen. Cue Macrium Reflect and a reinstallation of Xp to my C: drive using a backup from last week stored on an external drive, followed by a formatting of the new drive to get rid of the linux. Couple of unattended hours work - no long-term harm done.

Just to illustrate how illogical this is... then tried to set up the same arrangement on my older base unit, also Xp on the C:drive, installed the linux onto the other hard drive in a dual boot situaton, rebooted - everything fine as it should be.

I'm fairly used to linux and quite a fan. But it really hacks me off when this sort of thing happens. Why the different behaviour on two fairly similar systems? Someone who knew nothing about restoring systems would have been totally stuffed... and I wasn't too pleased myself!

 

[rh100]

might be worth googling about MBR and how to repair it, IIRC there are variations depending what OS's you've got

 

[beanzontoast]

might be worth googling about MBR and how to repair it, IIRC there are variations depending what OS's you've got

Yeah - I figured it was likely a MBR hash-up that had happened (hence the backup before I tried the install - have been bitten by MBR before). So strange that two systems running the same OS's can react so differently to the same dual boot though.
Back to running from the live dvd for now, methinks... Maybe try installing it to a usb for faster acccess if I get the experimenting urge again. Have to forget about yesterday's experience first!